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Protest against the harassment of a historian by the Ukrainian SBU

We protest against the harassment of a historian by the Ukrainian secret service, or SBU
On 9 September 2010 the SBU detained the historian Ruslan Zabilyi and confiscated his research material. Now the SBU is seeking to launch a criminal case against him.
Whether we share Ruslan Zabilyi’s views or not, we consider it absolutely impermissible for a security service to harass researchers and obstruct intellectual activities.
Many of us are signing this petition in spite of the fact that we seriously disagree with Ruslan Zabily’s politics and his views of Ukrainian history. Even while we abhor the politicization of history that has become so evident in the recent years of Orange versus anti-Orange debates, we believe that the resolution of scholarly disputes depends upon the free flow of ideas, and free access to historical sources no matter how controversial they may be.
We believe that a truly democratic and independent Ukraine needs and facilitates full and free inquiry into its history. Such an enquiry can only take place with the broadest access to Ukrainian archives.
Given the record of denial of access to archives and libraries, suppression of dissenting views, denial of academic freedom, and isolation of Ukraine from the international scholarly community in the past, any Ukrainian government must be especially vigiliant not to revive such practices.
Against this background, the treatment of Ruslan Zabilyi points to a reversion to regrettable and dangerous practices of the totalitarian past. We find this incident extremely worrying, especially in view of earlier illegitimate uses made of the SBU in the realm of academia and civil society under the new Ukrainian government.
Even strong disagreements about Ukraine’s past and its politics of memory and history cannot be solved by methods that amount to harassment and intimidation. Ukraine’s reputation is also bound to suffer very severely from such methods.
We call on the SBU and the Ukrainian government to show responsibility.
We call on Ukraine’s public and its scholarly community not to tolerate the intrusion of blatant police methods where research, scholarly dispute, and public debate should be the means of resolving – or living with – differences. We urge the Ukrainian public and the Ukrainian and international scholarly community to join us in supporting Ruslan Zabilyi and in censuring the use of police methods to try to quash scholarly discussion.

Joanna B. Michlic, Ph.D.,Director Project
on Families, Children and the Holocaust, BrandeisUniversity

Marina Mogilner, PhD, Editor for Russian and NIS, Ab Imperio, Kazan

Alexander Motyl, Associate
Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University, Deputy Director of the
Center for Global Change and Governance Co-Director of the Central and East
European Studies Program